If you can think of a way to get rid of it, let me know,' Anthony Bolton says of his Quiet Assassin nickname. 'The trouble is, once someone comes up with a name like that, it sticks.'

In truth, the nickname, earned when the Fidelity fund manager led the campaign to prevent Michael Green becoming chairman of the newly merged media group ITV, is merely the media's attempt at making Bolton, and what he does, seem more interesting. For, while he may be our most successful investment manager, having turned every £1 invested in his Special Situations fund in 1979 into £131 today, the minutiae of his day-to-day business is actually very dull.

For every meeting to plot a management coup, there are hundreds of straightforward ones with company management to discuss their business, thousands of research reports from analysts, emails and other briefings to read through before deciding whether to buy, hold or sell a particular company.

Neither does Bolton himself ooze excitement, but is unassuming, quiet and mild-mannered. While young Turks at boutiques such as Artemis are keen to adjourn to the pub after the formal investor meeting is over, he prefers to head for the train home to his rectory in West Sussex, usually accompanied by a bulging briefcase of papers and reports.

He is softly spoken and considered; in interviews and profiles he gives out more or less the same, restricted information - his press office joked about whether he revealed his date of birth when I asked for a biography. And while his funds are top of most advisers' buy lists - or were until his retirement plans were announced - and his performance statistics closely followed, his seminars and investor briefings are rather disappointing.

'You can sense the audience waiting to find out his secrets, hanging on for his words of wisdom, but they do not come,' says Tim Cockerill of financial advisers Rowan.

That may be because his analysis of what makes a good fund manager sounds little more than common sense - do not be afraid to go against the crowd, have a method and stick to it, meet as many companies as you can, watch what the directors are doing with their shares, be wary of complicated businesses - and would be supported by most other fund managers. But talking about investment strategy is one thing; producing table-topping returns more or less consistently for 27 years is something few other managers - Invesco Perpetual's Neil Woodford is the only other UK fund manager approaching his record - can achieve.

The trick, says Bolton, is to have 'a modus operandi that works for you. You can't be someone who is blown one way and then another, you have to have conviction. If someone has no conviction, they won't do any good, but if they have too much, and are pig-headed and won't change their mind, they will be a bad fund manager too. You have to be able to change as events dictate.'

He is famed for some of his bouts of conviction: in the late 1990s, for example, he was convinced that the technology boom was over-hyped and stayed steadfastly away from soaring dotcoms. The result was a year in which he lagged the market by almost 20 per cent - then five years when he did almost four times better than the market as other investors were forced to admit that he had been right all along.

As he counts down the months until he finally retires from active fund management - Fidelity announced last week that half of his fund will be given to Jorma Korhonen, a 40-year-old Finn unknown outside the firm, at the end of the year - Bolton admits that he will not miss the relentlessness of the fund management business today. 'Day in, day out, I need to take in a huge amount of information. That is what I want to stop.' He may find it hard to wind down: those who know him say he never stops amassing information.

There are hints that, outside the office, his life is rather less conformist. He used to drive a Porsche Cayenne, though he has now gone for the rather less exotic Toyota RAV 4, and has a holiday home in Antigua where he sails with his family - he has two sons and one daughter.

He graduated in engineering at Cambridge but quickly chose a City career, inspired by little more than an interest in the few stocks and shares held by his family. His first job was with Keyser Ullmann, a City bank that collapsed in the 1970s - he decided it was time to go when he saw the weekly meetings with the Bank of England pencilled on the chauffeur's schedule - and started his fund management career at Schlesinger, a South African bank, before joining Fidelity just as the US fund manager was establishing a London base. Then, there were just two fund managers; now there are more than 100. One observer says Bolton 'is treated like a god'.

He is also likely to be extremely well-rewarded though, as a private company, Fidelity does not have to disclose pay. He admits only to being paid a salary, a bonus and owning some company shares. But industry watchers say that salaries of £1m are commonplace, even for managers less skilled than Bolton, with bonuses of at least twice that.

When he gives up the second half of his Special Situations portfolio at the end of 1997, he will continue a mentoring role within the firm, helping his colleagues come up with ways to keep them ahead of the pack.

'In the early years [of my career], investment was all about getting information others did not have,' he says. 'Now, it is more a case of how you interpret information which is widely available.' When he started in fund management, the Fidelity way of employing analysts to conduct the firm's own research and spend time meeting companies was 'the exception. Now everyone has it'.

Fidelity rarely recruits from outside, so there was little surprise that the successor was homegrown - though the fact that he has been a fund manager for less than five years and currently manages little more than £100m across two funds did raise eyebrows, given the size of the Special Situations fund and its importance to Fidelity's retail profile. Bolton says he can see in Korhonen some of his own attributes, such as a willingness to be contrarian and to ignore the benchmarks that obsess so much of the industry, as well as a focus on value.

Both emphasise the importance of Fidelity's resources, its analysts feeding ideas to the fund managers. That is perhaps what grates most about the Quiet Assassin tag - it implies, says Bolton, that it was a personal decision to get rid of Green when in fact, it was taken by the firm as a whole.

But it was also unusual because it was public: Fidelity employs 'minders' to ensure that its managers do not get too much publicity and Bolton rarely participates in the kind of off-the-record briefings and private criticism of companies and executives indulged in by much of the industry. That does not mean he does not make his opinions known to companies - his style is to take sizable bets in firms, many outside the FTSE 100 index of the biggest in Britain, and to discuss with management ways in which they can improve. That sparks discussion and, occasionally, disagreement.

Last week alone, his successor had more publicity than Bolton got in his first decade in fund management - Korhonen says his five-year-old daughter was 'very proud' because his picture was in all the newspapers. She will have to get used to the publicity: Bolton will be a hard act to follow, and Korhonen's performance will be under the spotlight.

The CV

Name

Anthony Bolton

Born

7 March 1950

Educated

Stowe School; University of Cambridge (MA Engineering and Business Studies)